Saturday, 8 November 2014

'You show me your turnover and I'll show you mine!' An explanatory preamble about my bonkers spying career

Source: wikihow

As a lifelong Germanophile - well, from the age of eleven when I first started learning this gloriously blunt and endlessly compoundable language - I have decided to mark the upcoming 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by featuring a German perfume house in my next post. Both it, and the post I have in mind after that (also perfume-themed, I hasten to add), reference my time as an 'industrial spy', as it used to please ex-Mr Bonkers to call me.

So I thought it might be helpful to preface the Berlin post with an explanation of this particular aspect of market research - a type of work I am happy to have given up for good in 1998 - well, in terms of interviewing direct competitors, certainly. It was becoming increasingly difficult to secure the companies' cooperation, and was pretty nerve-wracking most of the time, so I decided to quit while I was ahead...

Okay, here goes...

Readers may well be familiar with
Pareto’s Principle, according to which 80% of the sales in any market are generated
by just 20% of the companies trading in it.
This led the MD of my old agency to conclude that the most accurate way
to size a market was to go directly to the source of supply – namely, the
competition.Marketing boasted in
proposals that we routinely “broke down the doors” of 90% of competitor
companies, which on a typical project with six key players equated to about
five and a half of them.We always hoped
it would be the half with the head.

My friend Clare, doing a sterling impression of a spy!

So why should competitors want to
see us? Sometimes we could offer report summaries
– these were well received, given the lack of published information available. But
often we relied on the surprise factor and a pleasant manner. Occasionally, even as people tried to wriggle
out of participating, their irrepressible sense of self-importance allowed key facts
to slip out: “Do you realise that we are the leading supplier of chocolate
enrobing equipment with a 70% share of
the world market, so what can you possibly tell us that we don’t already
know?” This gave me an opening to flatter
them into submission: “Ah yes, but I’m sure you didn’t get to where you are
today by resting on your laurels.”

As for how much we revealed
upfront about the sponsors of such studies, we found that as little as possible
worked best. Outright lying was banned,
so weaselly half-truths became our stock-in-trade. On one study for a major kitchen and bedroom
company, the sponsor was positioned as “a furniture supplier looking at the kitchen
market”. If anyone had thought to ask whether
our client was currently in the
kitchen business, we had to say they were, but no one did. Clients
already active in a market were sometimes tenuously described (though never by
me!) as “investors”, or even “venture capitalists”, and there was much airy
talk of “synergies” and “forging links with partners”.

The truth was that we did get
refusals - from whole people even, though not necessarily whole companies. If say, the Sales Director of a competitor would
not play ball, you would simply try the Marketing Director, who hopefully would
not be sitting at the next desk, having overheard your failed attempt to
recruit his colleague. Equally
toe-curling were situations where you would ring the second person, and the one
who just told you to get lost picked up their phone, having heard it ring as he
was passing! Then, even assuming the
second person agreed to meet you, there was still potential for things to implode
if, on arrival at the company, you were introduced to the first colleague who turned
you down - if he was more senior, he might well pull the plug on proceedings.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The most spectacular instance of
this occurred on a job in Benelux. Following
a refusal from the MD of the company in question, I managed to set up an
interview with his elderly father, the Chairman and a softer target. Three quarters of the way through, the MD burst
in, grabbed my questionnaire, tore it into tiny pieces and frogmarched me off
the premises. Fortunately, my short term
memory was spitting fire that day, and later, over a relaxing beer, I was able
to piece together most of the information.

As if getting the cooperation of
competitors were not challenging enough, we were urged to take photos of
respondents and their building, to be used as illustrations in reports. In winter, it was often dark after an
afternoon appointment, which meant taking the outdoor shot beforehand. This involved crouching behind a shrub at a
discreet distance, but could backfire if the respondent happened to glance out
of his window at that moment. At the
very least this resulted in a bumpy start to the meeting, and at worst a replacement
camera.

But competitor interviewing was
by no means just about skulking in bushes and dodging difficult questions. Some of my best interviews ever were with
companies who were happy to exchange views on an open basis. I once spent four hours squashed between a
fridge and a Portaloo on an exhibition stand in Paris with the Sales &
Marketing Director of a well-known glass manufacturer, and every time his
assistant popped in to say he was wanted by customers, he shooed her away with
an impatient wave, and returned to the absorbing task of crunching five year
sales forecasts for curved shower doors.

On reflection, Marketing’s
expression about “breaking down the doors” of competitors is perhaps a little
strong. For sometimes they opened the
door to us immediately, sometimes we had to knock quite hard first, and just
occasionally we nipped in through a side window.

And as a foretaste of my next post, here is a photo of some truly momentous breaking down of things....

What an enlightening look at (a very slightly) shady world! I had no idea about this kind of research and found it really interesting. How stressful it must have been! Especially the frogmarching and lurking in the bushes. Mind you, you are so personable I can see why you were so good at it.

It was a bit of a shady world, I agree! I felt happiest when we could offer people extracts from the report, for - given the scarcity of information on these obscure industrial products - any hard information was like gold dust, and provided people hadn't spun us a line along the way, the picture of the market we were able to piece together through this rather swashbuckling method was of genuine value.

I must say I don't know many researchers who will still undertake that sort of interviewing - in today's tougher business climate I think it would be really challenging.

Looking forward to your anniversary post (coming today?) and am curious which house you'll pick.Tonight, I might go out and have a look at some of the 8000 balloons "planted" along the former border. They light up to a 15 km long "wall of light" to be released into the dark sky after sunset to the sound of Beethoven's 9th symphony - well, Germans seem to love the extrems: On the one hand pathos like this on the other - in case you'll go for Maurer & Wirtz - demure understatement...

("short term momory spitting fire" is such a great expression and it's how I went through my school years, haha)Have a nice SundayAnka

I will be honest, when I joined the company I wasn't aware of the importance of this particular type of study in the overall mix. At least we weren't allowed to tell an outright fib, just to be economical with the truth until pressed. And I am pleased to say that I also conducted focus groups and one-to-one interviews with consumers as well, where I was much more in my comfort zone. And eventually I stopped doing competitor interviewing altogether of course, which was a relief. Though when the competitors were fully aware of the background, and still on board with it, and happy to gain some information in return - like the bloke in the glass company - that was when it all came together in the best possible way.

Random Musings Of A Born-Again Perfume Anorak - An Aldehydic Blend Of Passion And Irreverence!

Bonkers about Perfume

About me

I am an independent market researcher, specialising in industrial product sectors, who was struck down in early 2008 by 'sudden onset perfume mania'. 18 months later I took up blogging as a family-friendly outlet for the oddball ramblings prompted by this newfound interest in fragrance - and by my travels generally.